We’re excited to announce that TokBox offers a new premium feature that allows you to take control of your video chat. With moderation controls you can:

* Control who joins and remains in your call
* Silence the audio of participants
* Promote another participant to a moderator
* Control the media shared within your chat

Sign-up for your 30-day free trial now and pay only $9.99/month after that. The TokBox you know and love will continue to remain free. For a sneak peek at how moderation works check out the video below:

Thanks for such an amazing response; we were overwhelmed by the number of people that wanted to be a VIP. We wish everyone could participate, but so many people wanted to check out our new features that we’re not adding anymore VIPs at this time.

We’re going to release these new features to the public really soon so stay tuned for an announcement. I know we’re excited 🙂

In celebration of the New Year, we’re giving a select group of TokBox users free early access to all of our new features before we roll them out to the public. All we want in return? Feedback!

We received a lot of requests for new features in 2009 and are excited to share them with you as we release them. If you are interested in joining this exclusive group, please email VIP@tokbox.com with answers to the following questions:

1. What is your occupation? Do you take part in any special interest groups?
2. What do you most often use TokBox for? (ex. To hold meetings for my small business, to tutor students via video chat, to meet with members of my special interest group)

To kick off his holiday season, the Grinch broke into our office and made off with some of your video messages. Fortunately we’re on the good list and Santa is working with us to recover them as quickly as possible.

On a serious note, some of you may have noticed a black screen that displays a “Connection Error” or “Loading” message when you try and play any video message recorded before today. We are now working to resolve this issue and restore all your video messages and we’ll update you as soon as this has been resolved. Sorry for the scare and as always, feel free to send any questions to contact@tokbox.com. (If you have the email address of the Grinch, we’d also suggest sending him a note)

As of this weekend, EtherPad is working on TokBox. The AppJet team has temporarily restored their free service in response to user demand. We’re still working on finding an alternative solution so stay tuned for updates!

If you would like to read EtherPad’s blog post regarding these changes click here. As always, feel free to send any questions to contact@tokbox.com.

As you might have heard our partner AppJet, the company behind the real-time collaboration tool EtherPad, was acquired by Google today. We’d like to congratulate the AppJet team and wish them the best of luck.

But what does that mean for all of you that use EtherPad in TokBox? Unfortunately, as of this morning the Etherpad free service no longer exists, and as a result EtherPad no longer works on TokBox. We are working to remove it all together. However, we are busy working on ways to fill the gap with some really exciting new tools, so stay tuned.